Indeed. Not bad, but I think last week's would have been a better finale - just end it a few seconds later with Eleanor taking Michael's place. This ending was more sad than cliffhangery, and aside from that element, it felt more like the first episode of a season than the last.

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Indeed. Not bad, but I think last week's would have been a better finale - just end it a few seconds later with Eleanor taking Michael's place. This ending was more sad than cliffhangery, and aside from that element, it felt more like the first episode of a season than the last.

The final episides usually feel more like season premieres so is in keeping with the trend.

I have mixed feelings about the episode. The feels were real thanks to the acting and chemistry but it left me feeling incredibly frustrated as the decision was cowardly and false. Is resetting the moment you face a challenge the best way to deal with something? This was like the awful spider-man story where he sold the existence of his marriage with his wife to the devil (actually more similarities thsn i first thought) to save aunt may. It felt forced in the tired way that all serial storytelling seems to abhor a relationship between key characters and so invents obstacles. To me it simply highlighted how incredibly weak and pathetic chidi is. I know they tried to make it seem a noble sacrifice but based on the character it still boiled down to the coward's way out as he still hasn't learned to control his anxiety issues. It did work in the sense we finally got to see one of the many times this couple has been separated do it added weight to that concept.

On a positive note i really like how the bad place is so ahead of the game compared to how ineffective the soul squad are. The irony is that season 1 established that by creating this type of hell they actually improve people so as long as they don't keep resetting this will make the main cast "better". The question is whether the new additions find the situation "hellish" eg the blogger guy does not appear to be tortured by tahani yet. I'm hoping the next season has the main characters realise that they have to introduce a "personal hell" for these new additions. So it will be interesting how they establish this because at the moment the new additions have not been selected for hating each other - which was the entire point of the 4 original characters. I'm also curious as to what chidi's ex has in terms of being a really flawed human. From what we saw of her she seemed a really nice and well adjusted person so to me she's only not getting into heaven because of the impossible points system, not because she is inherently bad. So some retconning required? I also really hope they don't go the route of reset chidi falling for his ex first as that's really tired. Luckily they don't tend to do that with this show eg there's a chance the next one opens way into this test (or the 500th iteration of it)

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I'm also curious as to what chidi's ex has in terms of being a really flawed human. From what we saw of her she seemed a really nice and well adjusted person so to me she's only not getting into heaven because of the impossible points system, not because she is inherently bad. So some retconning required?

I thought it was reasonably clear that they had only picked people who were meant to personally mess with the original 4? I don't think she was a particularly bad person.

Am I the only one who has the sense that Michael was faking this whole "panic attack" thing, just to get Elenor to take over? In order to somehow foil the Bad Place's plan to use the Michael doppelgänger against them?

I personally felt that the last episode was a good bit better than the ones just before it.

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I thought it was reasonably clear that they had only picked people who were meant to personally mess with the original 4? I don't think she was a particularly bad person.

Am I the only one who has the sense that Michael was faking this whole "panic attack" thing, just to get Elenor to take over? In order to somehow foil the Bad Place's plan to use the Michael doppelgänger against them?

I personally felt that the last episode was a good bit better than the ones just before it.

Yes but i thought the point of why the original 4 turned out good was because of the inadvertent mistake in putting people together to intentionally antagonise each other? If so the bad place has the odds high in their favour because i thought the test was to show these new candidates will turn out to be good? Unless i misunderstood what the trial was?

Of course it may simply be the case that most people are inherently good and that no matter who is thrown in the trial they will eventually turn out "better"? Eg there's nothing special about the original group at all.

I wonder if Michael is angling for humans to run the afterlife and not the angels/demons/architects?

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I really liked it, and I thought it was incredibly sad and also made total sense.

Chidi can't just 'try' and see if things work out, because he literally has the highest stakes in the universe they inhabit resting on his shoulders. Everyone else is somewhat dispensable; Chidi is the one that is the teacher of ethics, and is the one that everyone started improving with when they engaged with him. He is the piece that brings all of this together. And he is right that anything that jeopardizes his chances in making this a success has to be removed. The stakes are just that high.

And it sucks. It sucks so very bad. But he can't risk it. Everything relies on him. Every single thing.

As to Simone not getting in, it simply can be because she didn't do enough to get into the good place - which is true of literally every human born since 1497. No one is good enough, because it is impossible to be good enough any more. Simone probably has some small flaws here and there, and has ways she can improve, but she's not there because she's bad or evil or particularly problematic; she's there because she destroys Chidi's ability to teach. Tahani's blogger is there to make her life a pain, not because he's particularly a horrible person. Presumably Jason and Eleanor's pledges are in a similar bent; they're not necessarily evil (and I would bet that Eleanor's person is actually a really good person), they're just disruptive.

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I see your argument but fundamentally it means chidi has not learned to control his anxiety at all. Maybe if he couldn't/hadn't reset so often he'd be capable of actually overcoming a personal challenge. So even if the reset was the best option it still looks bad for chidi that this was the best option. To me it is just a device for maintaining relationship spark in the show. It would have been more interesting if chidi wasn't allowed to reset and actually confront his problems with such high stakes at play. He is afterall only going to have to work with an ex who has no knowledge of their relationship. I think most of us could live with that vs having to work with your ex who knows you're an ex

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“JeremyBearimy” is the show’s explanation for how time works in the afterlife. How did you settle on that as the name you’d use?
Sometimes in writers’ rooms, you have a large-scale problem — a big-picture issue with the way you are presenting the world of the show — and you can either just ignore it, and hope no one questions it, or you can try to explain it in a way that is both satisfactory and (in a comedy) funny. If you choose the latter, solving that problem can eat up hours and days and weeks of the room’s time, as you debate the relative merits of how to construct your answer in a way that answers all of the questions it needs to answer without chewing up like 40 percent of an episode with exposition. And sometimes, if Josh Siegel is on your writing staff, he just says “What if Michael tells them that the timeline in the afterlife looks like: JeremyBearimy?” And everyone laughs and we all get to go home and see our families.

If you want the actual granular trivia, he first pitched “JeremyJeremy,” and we changed it to Bearimy because we felt like the loops in the capital B would better explain that time circles around and doubles back.

Did William Jackson Harper’s swole torso prompt any internal debate about how such a perpetually indecisive man like Chidi could get it together enough to follow a workout routine that would leave him looking like… that?
Yeah. Our internal logic is that his constant anxiety burns a lot of calories, and also that at some point someone was like, “You know, exercise is a good way to alleviate stress,” and he started doing push-ups and never stopped.